Re: Git commit messages

[Schanzenbach, Martin]

> On 27. May 2020, at 10:39, Florian Dold <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> On 5/27/20 1:58 PM, Daniel Golle wrote:
>> Yes, let's please establish something like that. I've tried my best
>> myself, but that's like 0.000001% of GNUnet commits -- and of course,
>> as was pointed out in a previous debate on that, GNUnet is not the
>> Linux kernel and experimentation becomes very slow if you have to
>> write a novel on every single step you do...
>> 
>> Another aspect is me struggling with reviewing things for GNUnet
>> because often times I can see what a commit does but I have no idea
>> what it was **supposed to do**, due to lacking commit descriptions.
>> Also knowing whether a commit was meant to be purely cosmetic is nice
>> when reviewing. So maybe we can be a bit more differentiated with our
>> to be established language of symbols:
>> Let's use '- ' prefix for small fixes or follow-up commits, just like
>> you suggested above.
>> Let's use '# ' prefix for purely cosmetic changes (ie. not functional
>> changegs intended).
> 
> I would *strongly* suggest not using "# " as the prefix for any type of
> commit message, as it's the default comment prefix when editing git
> messages ... that'll lead to all kinds of problem.  You don't want to
> tell people to change that comment character in their git config to,
> say, "%" just for GNUnet ;-)

Agreed. Also we should not overcomplicate things.

> 
> The minus is not very self explanatory.  I've been sporadically working
> on GNUnet-related stuff since about 2012 and $TODAY is the the day I
> learned what the intention of the "- " prefix is (it was sporadically
> used before, especially during TUM times).
> 
> Why not use something some prefix like "minor: " that is actually
> possible to figure out on your own?

Quick fixes are exactly that. "-" is developer convenience. Writing "minor:" is
not very intuitive and more importantly I worry about typos.

It is a developer feature and there is nothing wrong with having devs educated 
through
the handbook. Other projects have much more strict guidelines.

> 
> - Florian
>

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